Kristof Kryszinski likes to take it easy. He can’t always remember the last couple of beers from the night before. He drives an antique Carina and often needs to stop by the junkyard to replace the parts that have fallen off. He grudgingly feeds a despotic cat. And he’s also a private detective, who keeps himself afloat by investigating the occasional case for a beautiful female lawyer. One day, despite being badly hungover, he takes on the case of Sascha »The Pasha« Sentz, a filthy rich slot-machine casino operator who failed to turn up at home one evening after counting up his earnings. Kryszinski’s working methods turn out to be less than conventional. Averse to a systematic search, the detective relies instead on his »proven« instinct. Together with his friend Scuzzi, an Italian who doesn’t speak Italian but who’s extremely clever in dealing with the demimonde, he begins his search for Sentz. He botches it right from the start. But coincidence is on his side and Kryszinski tracks down the slot-machine king. Instead of turning him in to the man’s fretful spouse, however, and cashing in on his reward, he accompanies him on a drinking spree – and has to prove to inspector Menden the next day that he hasn’t committed a murder that night, of which not a single memory remains, only a splitting headache.

Jörg Juretzka

, born in Mülheim in 1955, is a carpenter by profession and used to build log cabins in Canada before turning to professional writing. Furthermore, Juretzka writes film scripts and is a successful children’s book author. For his crime fiction novels with protagonist Kristof Kryszinski he won the Deutscher Krimipreis three times, recently for »Totally groovy« in 2010.